Qatar: 2022 World Cup host. If those words still seem a little incongruous two days after Fifa's vote awarded hosting rights for the world's biggest football tournament to a desert state, the origin of the story is stranger still.

Two years ago Qatari leaders were grappling with a fundamental problem. Their nation's hydrocarbon output is set to peak in 2012, creating a pressing need to diversify an economy that will soon be growing at 20% a year. Tourism, as most fast‑maturing economies discover, is a good way of going about it but, in a highly competitive market, pushing the Qatari brand would always be a challenge.

Dubai's rise to become the Arabic-speaking tourism destination of choice had turned into a vast vanity project, ultimately consuming the emirate in a gulf of debt. By contrast Qatar's genius was to alight on a cost-effective plan for getting their nation's name out there: joining a competition to host the World Cup, a race that would grab the attention of sections of the world's media throughout. If by some quirk it won, the prize would be immense.

"Although that might have been the case at the start," Qatar 2022's campaign strategist, the Englishman Mike Lee, said this year, "now there's a real feeling we can win this thing."

Lee would be proved right but few shared his instincts. The candidacy of Qatar's capital, Doha, for the 2016 summer Olympic Games had fallen flat. Success for Doha's bid would have shifted the event to late October, outside the International Olympic Committee's stipulated date range, since only those dates would have avoided the worst of the summer heat and humidity. Temperatures in Qatar can push mercury beyond 50C in June and July.

Yet Fifa, which has previously taken its tournament to Mexico and to US cities where summer temperatures can peak at similar heights, does not share the IOC's concerns. The Olympics' organiser has the health of marathon runners, road cyclists and 50km race-walkers to consider.

Nonetheless, although the game's 24 remote rulers in the executive committee, which made the decision to award the tournament to Qatar on Thursday, are nonchalant about the heat, it is not a view widely shared in football. "Who knows if the big football nations in Europe will even go to Qatar in 2022," one senior football figure told the Guardian. "I could see some clubs saying they don't want their players to go there because it is too dangerous healthwise."

That would be a serious problem for the game as a whole, since it is the big European clubs alone who pay the wages of most World Cup players. The son of Qatar's ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad Al Thani, whose central and multilingual involvement in the bid campaign proved so persuasive for Fifa, must now persuade the world that the heat is manageable. "We can guarantee 27 degrees on the pitch," he has said. "A stadium with controlled temperature is the answer to the problem. We have other plans up our sleeves as well."

The 2022 bid team made much play of the 15,000-seat Al Sadd stadium, with its gas-powered air-cooling system. It intends the second-generation versions, with 70,000 seats, to be solar powered – as is one currently under construction in another Gulf state.

Qatar has the advantage of hosting the Asian Games next year but there have been doubts about the construction schedule for that event. "With the Asian Games, it became a last-minute panic to get everything ready and in place," one Doha resident told Reuters. "The biggest thing is that there is so much to be done. It's a monumental task and you need to finish it a few years early."

However, perhaps the biggest challenge for a country with sports-tourism ambitions is whether the supporters will decamp to the desert for the tournament. Fans' appetite for alcohol during a World Cup is voracious. During the 2006 World Cup in Germany more than a million litres of beer were sold in the stadiums alone, with the four-week World Cup finals contributing to a 190.4m-litre increase in Germany's annual beer consumption.

Qatar will have to work hard to counteract the perception that as an Islamic state the World Cup will come into conflict with local alcohol laws: it will not. One advantage of the Thanis' absolutism is that they can alter legislation at a whim.

"These plans show just how serious, innovative and focused we are about hosting a Fifa World Cup that will deliver a fantastic experience for players, fans and the media," Thani has said, and Fifa was convinced.

Elsewhere, however, doubts linger. And those who fear Qatar's infrastructure might strain in accommodating the tournament in 12 years had fuel for their suspicions yesterday. At the first sign of genuine global interest, the bid's website server collapsed.

• This article was amended on 6 December 2010. The original referred to Qatar's ruler as Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa Al Thani. This has been corrected.